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Client

SharpSpring

Location

Gainesville, FL  USA

Services Provided

Comprehensive B2B influencer marketing program

Situation

SharpSpring allows marketers to capture more leads and salespeople to track and convert those leads through a robust platform that includes CRM and automation capabilities.

While SharpSpring is a valuable tool for nurturing leads, their own challenge was to increase brand visibility, awareness, and trust among small digital marketing agencies, which are one of their core audiences. SharpSpring offers a re-brandable product that’s perfect for digital agencies to package and resell to their own clients, as a differentiator and profit center.

Historically, SharpSpring has found that outreach to agency owners and executives hasn’t been as successful as they would like, due to the limited time and attention of that audience.

Therefore, they came to Convince & Convert to develop an influencer program that would win the trust and time of these busy agency owners and executives.

Challenges

SharpSpring faced the following challenges:

  • The product provides a ton of value to agencies, but it also requires education to get agencies on-board
  • They compete in a space with brands including Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot
  • They needed to build trust, so agencies would want to learn more.

Solution

Convince & Convert had to help SharpSpring become viewed as trusted and valuable to agencies. While they had a strong email list of their own, SharpSpring also needed to reach new, highly relevant potential customers. To achieve these goals, C&C helped SharpSpring develop a program that would speak to the challenges and motivations of agency owners and executives—they identified the right content to build trust and desirability among the right people.

Together, C&C and SharpSpring created the “SharpSpring Agency Acceleration Series,” an online event that featured 13 macro and topical influencers including such names as Seth Godin, Ann Handley, Rand Fishkin, Shama Hyder, and others—people really known and trusted by agency owners.

Because agency owners wanted to learn from these experts, they readily signed up for the program. This not only cultivated trust in SharpSpring as a resource for agencies, but also gave the audience an opportunity to learn about SharpSpring’s capabilities in an organic way.

Agency Acceleration Series from SharpSpring

Results

  • Within 60 days, more than 4,000 registrations to attend the event
  • 2,500 marketing qualified leads from this C&C program so far
  • Continuing efforts with C&C into 2021.

Convince & Convert hit it out of the park with a heavy-hitter influencer strategy. Jay and team provided a complete overarching strategy based on research, great creative ideas and detailed execution. No matter how small or big the task, the team came through and helped us launch one of our biggest marketing initiatives.

Kim Anchors
Director of Marketing – Lead Generation, SharpSpring

 

Client
Texas Exes – Alumni Association for The University of Texas
Location
Austin, Texas USA
Services Provided
Situation
Like many alumni organizations across the country, Texas Exes saw declining engagement, challenges with hitting giving goals, and in general, had a harder time getting the attention from their target audiences. It was a good time to re-connect and re-assess alumni sentiment and needs.
Challenges
Although the Texas Exes had a strong organization and following, they still faced significant challenges:
  • Generally speaking, the University of Texas at Austin has a very decentralized culture, which pervades every related organization and department.
  • Texas Exes wanted to make sure that teams used to operating independently didn’t just see this research as something for the marketing team to use in crafting giving pitches, but data that could inform and guide every area, from student outreach, to events, to fundraising and beyond.
Solution
Convince and Convert started by implementing an attitudinal survey that asked alumni how they felt about the association generally, events and benefits, as well as their feelings about their time at the University of Texas at Austin. Convince & Convert then performed a thorough analysis, developed personas, recommended strategies, and content ideas that would support the needs and desires of the alumni. One of the key findings was that the alumni’s main unmet desire was more professional interaction, including networking, mentoring and job opportunities. When COVID hit, it became clear that they had a significant opportunity not to just move events online but do so in a strategic and intentional way. Texas Exes had been in conversation with Graduway, a platform that provides a private social network with robust features, for more than a year. In six weeks, Convince & Convert helped the Texas Exes accelerate this concept, finalize their contract, and plan a launch strategy. In addition, Convince & Convert helped organize conversations beyond just Texas Exes alumni needs to include Career Services, Athletics, and a number of colleges within the university to ensure they all had some ownership in how their corner of the platform would come together.
Results
Convince & Convert crafted plans for each of their service areas to evolve to better match the needs uncovered in the survey. Texas Exes was proud to have the most successful higher ed launch Graduway has ever experienced and are using the insights gathered from this active and engaged group to develop and refine future plans for the organization and the university. Reached 8,000+ users in four months after virtual networking space rollout.

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